How Bethesda’s Creation Club Works, According to Bethesda

Ah, E3. The place of new games, surprise announcements, and PR blunders. Bethesda’s E3 conference gave us an awesome look B.J. Blazkowicz bringing his certain set of skills (blowing Nazis to hell) to America. They also gave us Creation Club.

Here’s how Bethesda describes:

It features new items, abilities, and gameplay created by Bethesda Games Studios and outside development partners including the best community creators. Creation Club content is fully curated and compatible with the main game and official add-ons.

Gamers see it as another attempt at paid mods that backfired on Bethesda in a big way last year. The like-to-dislike ratio on the Creation Club trailer tells us all we need to know about where the community stands right now. 2,000 likes versus 44,000 dislikes. We haven’t seen that kind of reaction since the Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare trailer last May.

Bethesda tried to highlight the differences between Creation Club and paid mods in the trailer. But it fell on deaf ears. The biggest difference is Bethesda Games Studios has a hand in creating these new pieces of content.

“They are internally created, or internally created along with external developers,” says Hines. “They’re fully internally developed and work the same across all three platforms. They’re guaranteed to work with your save games. They don’t turn off Achievements or Trophies, unlike mods. They’re guaranteed to work with all DLC. They’ll be localized as needed. They will be put out and created as official content from the studio.”

Hines went on to compare it to the kind of small work Bethesda might outsource.

“Like, we need a whole bunch of flower pots; we don’t just make flower pots all day, [Bethesda developers] focus on the bigger stuff and outsource the flower pots for somebody else to make. This is, in some ways, a lot like that–it’s all official content, we don’t have any issues with platforms like what kind of things are you or are you not allowed to include in what you do because it’s coming from us. It’s QA’d by us. It’s managed by us as official content and then put up and made available.”

The question is, well there are still a lot of questions actually.

How much are credits? Will modding as it stands today continue untouched? What happens if a modder re-creates a piece of content from the Creation Club as a regular mod?

I don’t necessarily have a problem with paid modding. Some of the content modders create is stunning, and they deserve to be paid for their work. But that should also be their decision. It shouldn’t mean all mods have to be paid for. And I think that’s the biggest concern from the community. That Creation Club is the first step towards a modding becoming a walled garden.

Bethesda is clear in explaining what Creation Club is. Smaller pieces of content with official Bethesda Game Studios support. As long as regular modding stays untouched, I don’t have a problem with it.

We’ll just have to wait and see how it all shakes out when Creation Club officially launches later this summer. Right now, Bethesda still has some convincing to do to their community.